Lahore mango season: choosing, ripening and storing aam.

The season, variety by variety

Pakistani mango season is a relay, not a single event, and knowing which variety is running tells you what to expect before you touch the fruit. Buying a Langra in the last week of the season and a Langra at its peak are two different fruits.

The varieties also want different things from you. Sindhri arrives large and firm and is often sold under-ripe, so it usually needs three or four days on the counter. Anwar Ratol is small, ripens fast and bruises easily, so buy it in small amounts. Chaunsa comes in already close to ready and does not wait around.

• Sindhri — late May into June. Large, oval, thin-skinned, turns bright yellow. Almost no fibre, sweetness on the gentle side. The mango to cube.
• Dusehri — June and July. Oblong, stays greenish-yellow, smooth flesh, very sweet. Excellent for pulp and lassi.
• Anwar Ratol — June into July. Small, round, thin-stoned, and the most intensely perfumed of the lot. Eaten out of hand over a sink.
• Langra — late June and July. Stays green even when fully ripe, so colour tells you nothing. Distinctly resinous, almost turpentine-scented aroma, and a slight fibre.
• Chaunsa — July into August. The late-season heavyweight: dense honeyed sweetness and a strong aroma. Sold as white, golden and black Chaunsa depending on the strain.
• Fajri, Saroli, Almas and Malda fill the gaps around these, mostly in the July-to-August end of the run.

How to choose a mango at the crate

Smell first. Hold the stem end — the shoulder where it was cut from the tree — right up to your nose. A ripe mango smells sweet, floral and unmistakably of mango. A faint smell means a few more days on the counter. No smell at all means it was picked far too green and will soften without ever becoming sweet.

Then feel. Cup the fruit in your whole hand and squeeze very gently. You want a slight, even give, like a ripe avocado, strongest at the shoulder end. Firm all over means unripe. Any part that dents and stays dented is already breaking down inside, and one soft patch will spread through the whole fruit within a day.

Then look, but look at the right things. Colour is variety-specific and useless as a general rule. What is worth reading is the shape and the skin. A plump, full shoulder means a well-filled fruit; a flat, shrivelled one near the stem means it was picked immature. Fine dark freckles are normal and often a sign of a sweet fruit. Large black patches that are soft under the thumb are rot. A little dried white sap around the stem is fine and simply shows a clean cut.

Ripening at home: paper, rice and patience

Mangoes ripen with ethylene, the gas ripening fruit gives off, and the whole trick is trapping it around the fruit. A brown paper bag on the kitchen counter, folded loosely shut so air still moves, does it in two to four days. Add a kela or a seb to the bag and it happens faster, because those are heavy ethylene producers.

The old method works for the same reason: bury the mangoes in a container of rice or atta, or wrap them in newspaper and pack them in a basket covered with a cloth. Grain traps the gas around the fruit and holds a steady, warm temperature. Check daily, because in a Lahore June that basket can move from firm to over-ripe overnight.

Two rules while ripening. Keep them out of direct sun, which cooks the side facing the window and leaves the other side hard. And keep them off the fridge until they are actually ready — chilling an unripe mango stalls the process for good.

Why the fridge ruins an unripe mango

Mango is a tropical fruit and it suffers chill injury below roughly thirteen degrees, which is warmer than any domestic fridge. An unripe mango left in the cold develops a dull grey cast on the skin, sometimes with sunken pitted patches, and the flesh inside turns pale and woolly. Worse, the ripening machinery is disrupted, so when you bring it back out it softens without ever getting sweet or aromatic.

Once a mango is properly ripe, the fridge is exactly right. It will hold three to five days chilled, and it slows down a whole crate that all decided to ripen on the same afternoon. Take it out twenty or thirty minutes before eating, because cold flattens the aroma.

Many households soak mangoes in cold water for half an hour before cutting, which is a long-standing habit across Punjab. At the very least it rinses off field dust and the acrid sap that can dry around the stem, and it takes the warmth out of fruit that has been sitting in a hot room.

Cutting a mango, and what to do with a glut

Stand the fruit on its end with the narrow edge facing you: the stone is a flat oval running that way, so slicing about a centimetre off each side of the centre gives you two clean cheeks. Score each cheek in a grid down to the skin without cutting through, then push the skin inside out and the cubes stand up on their own. The strips left around the stone belong to whoever did the cutting.

When a crate all ripens at once, pulp it. Blend the flesh smooth, freeze it flat in bags or in an ice tray, and you have mango for lassi and kulfi months later. Blended with thick dahi it makes a proper mango lassi rather than the pale imitation made from syrup. Kachcha aam, the hard green fruit from early in the season, goes a different way entirely — into chutney, into achaar, or grated with masala.